Conversation recorded between Mimi Zeiger and Leopold Lambert in Los Angeles on April 23, 2014for the Archipelago, the podcast platform of The Funambulist. Read More …
There are hip workplaces, high-tech workplaces, and old-school buttoned down workplaces. Then there’s Funny or Die’s new headquarters, which can only be described as funhouse chic. The color palette tilts to pop hues–straight out of early MTV. The architecture is a little off kilter. And that’s okay, according to Jana Fain, the company’s director of operations. “You can’t walk in and feel nothing,” she says.
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As a civic figure, the architect has the privilege and responsibility to articulate and translate the collective aspirations of society, and specifically of those not able to sit at the decision-making tables.
Throughout history, architects have engaged with this responsibility and the structures of economic, political and cultural power in different ways and with varying degrees of success. With the rise of globalization and the homogenization of the contemporary city, the role of the architect in the political arena has often been relegated to answering questions that others have asked. While designing the next economically driven cultural-iconic-touristic object, an increasing amount of both architects and with them, politicians, have forgotten the ethics that should be associated with architectural practice and the potential of design in the construction of public life. Read More …
Join us at USC School of Architecture for a lecture by Mimi Zeiger.
Trained as an architect, critic Mimi Zeiger tracts the rise of publishing as practice through her own work. Memos from the Front Line rejects the binary of the print and digital divide and suggests that the commingling of the analog and algorithmic creates rich territory for cultural production, criticism, and architectural experimentation.
Wednesday, April 16, 2014 | 2pm
Gin Wong Conference Center
Harris Hall 101
Dear Mayor Garcetti,
“The best place to view Los Angeles of the next millennium is from the ruins of its alternative future.”
—Mike Davis, City of Quartz (1990)
“L.A. WANTS 2 HELP U”
—Billboard Oracle, L.A. Story (1991)
What is the future of Los Angeles? This is the question everyone is asking. And it is the perennial question posed by everyone from William Mulholland to Walt Disney to Frank Gehry. In each casting of the runes, the city is both subject and object. It is a place where the wind rustling the bougainvillea is a siren song and the Santa Ana’s blowing down palm fronds is an omen. But you know this, my fellow Angelino. Just as you know that The Los Angeles 2020 Commission wrinkles its collective brow with concern as it evaluates the next six years and that the LA2050 initiative (funded by the Goldhirsh Foundation) foresees an optimistic, crowdsourced metropolis. Read More …
Drive down Los Angeles’s Sunset Boulevard and you’ll discover Morphosis Architects’ latest project, a futuristic cube, rising from a strip of lowly fast food outlets. The structure is the West Coast micro-campus for Boston’s Emerson College, and is home to 217 students majoring in television, film, marketing, acting, screenwriting, and journalism. As you draw closer, the solid mass reveals itself as a proscenium, framing a patch of blue sky. The building’s two residential towers bookend open-air courtyards and performance spaces. “Some might say it is an aggressive building, but I see it as rather classical,” says Thom Mayne, FAIA, principal of Morphosis Architects, with offices in Culver City, Calif., and New York. “[The design] is a critique of an institutional building as a big block.” Read More …
History was written on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Or at least a little piece of it, as a group of volunteer Wikipedia editors gathered in MOCA’s outdoor plaza for Unforgetting L.A., an edit-a-thon sponsored by online art magazine East of Borneo. The third in a series, the event’s goal was to build Wikipedia articles for artists, curators, and galleries of the past 30 years — the three art-rich decades since MOCA’s inception. Read More …
This week Patrik Schumacher took to Facebook to decry the state of architecture as both a discipline and a discourse. Quickly filling his timeline, he scolded “critics and critical architects” for their agnosia, or form blindness.
“This [visual condition] is involved in the critic’s inability to grasp the significance of parametricism,” he wrote, aghast at the lack of appreciation of a high period of organic form derived from computational inputs. An hour later he continued his imperatives, writing “STOP political correctness in architecture. But also: STOP confusing architecture and art. Architects are in charge of the FORM of the built environment, not its content.” Read More …
Architecture and Design Film Festival Panel:
Hands-on, Ground-up: Community and Design/Build
- Dave Sellers
Architect - Jenna Didier
Artist - Mimi Zeiger – Moderator
Critic and Curator - Steve Badanes
Architect / Educator
Hippie havens, handbuilt provocations, and tech experiments with Yestermorrow, Jersey Devil, and Materials & Applications.
Mediabisto’s coverage of the panel by Brigitte Brown.
Emerson College Los Angeles, the newly opened West Coast outpost of the Boston-based institution, sits on a stretch of Sunset Boulevard that is rapidly changing from seedy to cinematic. The school has strong alumni community in Los Angeles and an established internship program. Designed by Wallpaper* Design Awards judge Thom Mayne of Morphosis Architects, the $85 million, 10-storey building-cum-microcampus hosts students majoring in television, film, marketing, acting, screenwriting, and journalism. Read More …